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Monday, 16 April 2012

The Stink of Degeneration

Max Nordau (1849-1923) ... in the book Degeneration ... described a confluence of degeneration and hysteria ... "in the life and conduct of men," and in "the tastes and aesthetic instincts of fashionable society."

According to a press release from the watchdog group Judicial Watch, emails they obtained reveal then-Deputy White House Communications Director Jennifer Psaki, threatened to put dead fish in “the fox cubby” ...

"Regarding general anti-FNC bias within the Obama White House in an October 23, 2009, email exchange between Jennifer Psaki, Deputy White House Communications Director and [then-Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs in the Treasury Department Jenni] LeCompte, Psaki writes, ‘I am putting some dead fish in the fox cubby – just cause”.

Okay, now back to the present and the object of Surber's Ire.

Here is his leadership, as reported by CNS:

... Obama told a panel at the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia that part of his job there was to scout out locations for a future vacation with First Lady Michelle Obama.

Obama was speaking on a panel with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff when he made the remarks. The panel was moderated by Chris Matthews of MSNBC.

“I want to thank President Santos and the people of Colombia for the extraordinary hospitality in the beautiful city of Cartagena,” said Obama. “We’re having a wonderful time. And usually when I take these summit trips, part of my job is to scout out where I may want to bring Michelle back later for vacation. So we’ll make sure to come back sometime in the near future.”

His future is vacations come January. And like the screwball who knows he is going to get fired, Barack Obama is playing it for all it is worth. I hope Laura Bush counted the White House silverware before leaving.

Comments

I'm not sure Nordau could be called a political conservative -- after all, his notion of "muscular Judaism" and his strong Zionism were both considered, in his time, fairly radical. But he was most assuredly a conservative in the temperamental sense. Late in life, he wrote something that sounds almost Burkean -- and that has real significance in our own day: "You Westerners [being Hungarian, Nordau evidently considered himself an Easterner] always crave excitement; you are always eager to change everything. You cannot leave things as they are; so you destroy the most beautiful gift granted to man on earth: the joy of finding everything again as one had known it." It's impossible to read those words without recalling the excitement with which Obama's promise of Hope and Change was greeted -- the eagerness that gripped his legion of groupies when they heard his pledge to stop the rise of the oceans. Now, three years later, it's impossible for the rest of us not to yearn for the joy of finding America as we once had known it. Nordau wrote his comment in 1915; one year earlier, all of Western Europe had been seized with the "craving for excitement" as World War I began. By 1915, Western Europe was an abattoir, and all of Western Europe was aghast at what its craving for excitement had wrought. Nordau knew what he was talking about. He would not, I'm sure, be at all surprised by our current plight.